Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

"If there is one thing you can count on, its that most people will only play fair if there is a chance they will get caught."
Oh the typical primitive moral thinking and suspiciousness. This kind of thinking is childish and counter-productive. http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm

People will often play fair if they are treated fairly. If a flash ad uses a lot of cpu, I'd say it's stealing my cpu power. They are actually using my computer without my conscent. They may even play sounds in my own home without my conscent. So I give them the boot.
People didn't start blocking ads until they became annoying. But when that happened, people started blocking all ads, not just the annoying ones.